From: naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   On 2024-05-30, Peter Moylan  wrote:   
      
   >>> “Five language communities,” I suppose.   
   >>   
   >> * Anglo-Saxon   
   >> * Brittonic   
   >> * Gaelic   
   >> * Pictish, whatever its affiliation was   
   >> * British Latin~Romance   
   >   
   > Yes, with levels of "community". Brittonic and Gaelic were related   
   > languages , but I doubt that the speakers of those languages knew that,   
      
   I don't really know how linguistically naive people perceive this.   
   Back in fifth grade or so, when I started learning English as my   
   first foreign language and knew nothing about language history, I   
   certainly noticed that English was oddly similar to German and that   
   there were semi-regular correspondences such as th- <> d-.  One of   
   my classmates remarked on further similarities between English and   
   the local Palatine dialect.  (In retrospect easily explained by   
   Palatine German missing part of the High German consonant shift.)   
   French, which I started in seventh grade, was conspicuously more   
   different.   
      
   > The "British Latin" were those who chose to join the Roman Empire. We   
   > don't yet know who the Picts were, apart from guessing a relationship   
   > with the Gaels or the Britons. So it's still a little bit fuzzy.   
      
   I thought that the consensus about Pictish was flipping back and   
   forth every so often, but English Wikipedia now aligns itself with   
   the position that evidence from toponyms and personal names firmly   
   demonstrates Pictish to have been a Brittonic language.  That Bede   
   inconvieniently classed them as different language communities is   
   mentioned and disregarded.   
      
   --   
   Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)